The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000 Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavour

by Martin Meredith

During the 1970s, Mengistu launched five major offensives against Tigrayan rebels. A sixth offensive in 1980 in central Tigray lasted for seven months and caused massive disruption. A seventh offensive in 1983 in western Tigray forced hundreds of thousands of inhabitants to flee their homes. When parts of Tigray and Wollo were then struck by drought, the area was already awash with destitute refugees, desperately seeking help from overcrowded relief centres. Preoccupied with preparations to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Ethiopia’s 1974 revolution, Mengistu ignored the plight of masses dying of hunger north of the capital and ordered officials to remain silent. When news of the disaster began to filter out, it inspired an extraordinary surge of compassion and generosity from peoples and governments around the world, prompting the greatest single peace-time mobilisation of the international community in the twentieth century. But even while relief organisations were struggling to cope with the calamity of mass starvation, Mengistu refused to allow the distribution of food supplies to areas under rebel control and launched yet another military offensive.

  A series of international rescue packages were devised during the 1980s intended to address Africa’s economic decline. In 1981, a World Bank report recommended a complete overhaul of the economic strategy that had prevailed for more than two decades. Whereas in the 1960s Western economists had advocated that the state should act as the motor of development and dismissed the role of markets, in the 1980s they argued that state intervention was the principal cause of development failure and called for market-oriented development strategies. In place of state ownership, they proposed an enhanced role for the private sector. Acting in tandem, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund offered to assist African governments with financial support provided that they agreed to radical economic reform. They wanted governments to raise agricultural commodity prices; remove urban subsidies; cut back bloated bureaucracies; sell or close state enterprises; devalue currencies; and reduce budget deficits and public borrowing.

  All this threatened the systems of patronage that underpinned most of Africa’s leaders and ruling elites. Africa’s bloated bureaucracies and systems of regulation were crucial political assets, the means by which ruling elites awarded jobs, contracts and other opportunities for gain to kinsmen and political supporters. State control of the economy had provided them with a whole range of perks, privileges and avenues for money-making since independence.

  Facing bankruptcy, however, African governments had little alternative but to accept the conditions set by the IMF/World Bank. During the 1980s, some forty governments signed ‘stabilisation agreements’ and accepted ‘structural adjustment programmes’. In all, a total of 243 loan agreements were made. Foreign aid became an increasingly crucial component of African economies. Dozens of donor institutions and Western non-government organisations were involved, some taking over key functions of the state, notably in health and education. Over the course of two decades, the 1970s and the 1980s, Africa obtained $200 billion in foreign aid.

  But while accepting donor funds, most governments prevaricated over reform and soon found that were no serious consequences. Aid kept coming. Debt was simply allowed to accumulate and be rescheduled, again and again. Moreover, ruling politicians soon turned the whole business of privatising state assets into an opportunity for further money-making, using funds provided by donor organisations to hand over public companies to political cronies, relatives and select businessmen on highly favourable terms, including low-interest loans and prolonged pay-off periods. In Nigeria in the late 1980s, military officers acquired a majority of shares in four-fifths of the hundred state-owned firms that were privatised.

  By the end of the 1980s, despite the inflow of foreign funds and debt cancellation, little had changed for the better. Per capita income in black Africa during the 1980s contracted by an annual rate of 2.2 per cent. External debt tripled, reaching $160 billion, a sum exceeding gross national product. The World Bank itself concluded in 1989, after a decade of failure, that Africa’s economic malaise had not just economic but political causes.

  The political record of Africa since independence was stark: not a single African head of state in three decades had allowed himself to be voted out of office. Of some 150 heads of state who had trodden the African stage, only six had voluntarily relinquished power. They included Senegal’s Léopold Senghor, after twenty years in office, and Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere, after twenty-three years in office. Some members of the first generation of African leaders still clung to power even in old age. Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Côte d’Ivoire was eighty-four; Kamuzu (Hastings) Banda in Malawi was ninety-one.

  Out of a list of fifty African countries, almost all were one-party states or military dictatorships. In thirty-two states, opposition parties were illegal. Elections, when held, served mainly to confirm the incumbent president and his party in power. Over the course of 150 elections held in twenty-nine countries between 1960 and 1989, opposition parties were never allowed to win a single seat. Only three countries – Senegal, Botswana and the tiny state of the Gambia – sustained multi-party politics, holding elections on a regular basis that were considered reasonably free and fair.

  The public mood in Africa, however, was beginning to change. In one country after another, starting in 1989, discontent with the incompetence, corruption and stifling oppression of Big Man rule erupted in protests and demonstrations. Students were at the forefront, but other urban groups – businessmen, professionals, churchmen, labour unions and civil servants – joined in. A new wind of change was stirring.

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  LIBERATION WARS

  In southern Africa, meanwhile, the fortress of white power began to crumble. During the 1960s, nationalist movements launched a succession of guerrilla wars to oust the Portuguese from Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, a small west African colony, using neighbouring African territories as bases from which to recruit and train supporters and to gather arms. Guerrilla attacks were confined initially to border areas but steadily spread. The drain of fighting three simultaneous wars sapped Portuguese manpower and morale and led to growing disaffection among the officer corps and army conscripts. In April 1974, the Portuguese military seized power in Lisbon and promptly opened negotiations to withdraw from Africa. In Guinea-Bissau, negotiations were conducted relatively swiftly. By September 1974, Guinea-Bissau was recognised as an independent republic. But the transition to independence in both Mozambique and Angola was marked by confusion and chaos.

  In Mozambique, the entire colonial administration fell into disarray. As Portuguese forces withdrew from the field, Frelimo guerrillas poured into areas of central Mozambique unopposed. Frightened by Frelimo’s revolutionary rhetoric and fearing revenge attacks, hundreds of white settlers in rural areas abandoned their homes and fled to the coast. A mass exodus of whites was soon underway. In protracted negotiations with the Portuguese, Frelimo demanded recognition as the ‘sole legitimate representative of the Mozambique people’ and the unconditional transfer of power without prior elections. The outcome was that in September 1974 Portugal agreed to hand over power exclusively to Frelimo after a nine-month transition period. The white exodus gathered pace. By the time that Mozambique gained its independence in June 1975, the country had lost not only most of its administrators and officials, but also managers, technicians, artisans and shopkeepers. In all some, 200,000 whites fled Mozambique, abandoning farms, factories and homes.

  Undaunted by the crippling loss of skilled manpower, Frelimo’s leader Samora Machel embarked on a programme of revolutionary action intended to transform Mozambique into a Marxist-Leninist state. In a series of decrees, Frelimo nationalised plantations and businesses; introduced central economic planning; and ordered collective agricultural production. With similar fervour, Machel sought to root out ‘traditional’ customs and land practices and to eliminate the influence of chiefs and headmen. The Catholic Church and its adherents were another target. Frelimo ordered an end to public religious
festivals, took over church property and terminated church involvement in education and marriage. Traditional religions were also denounced. The consequences were disastrous. Machel’s policies provoked widespread discontent that eventually helped fuel fifteen years of civil war.

  The transition in Angola was even more turbulent. Three rival nationalist factions fought among themselves to gain power, transforming a colonial war into a civil war, causing the flight of almost the entire white population and drawing the Soviet Union and the United States into a perilous Cold War confrontation by proxy. What was at stake was control of Angola’s oilfields and diamond mines.

  All three factions relied for support from different ethnic groups. The home base of Holden Roberto’s FNLA was Bakongo territory in northern Angola. Agostinho Neto’s MPLA was rooted in Kimbundu areas around the capital, Luanda. Jonas Savimbi’s Unita movement gained a following among the Ovimbundu in the central highland districts of Huambo and Bié. All three factions were weak and disorganised. They made no serious effort to reach a negotiated settlement but instead looked to foreign sponsors to give them supremacy.

  In the interim, the Portuguese attempted to organise a coalition government to prepare the way for elections and independence in November 1975. But shortly after it was set up in January 1975, the coalition collapsed amid heavy fighting in Luanda. Supplied by weapons from the Soviet Union, the MPLA drove the FNLA and Unita out of Luanda and gained tentative control of other urban areas. A mass exodus of 300,000 whites followed, causing the collapse of government services and the economy. As independence day approached, the United States and South Africa threw their weight behind the FNLA and Unita in a concerted effort to prevent the MPLA from taking power in Luanda. South African forces invaded from South-West Africa, aiming to link up with the FNLA in an assault on the capital. What saved the MPLA from defeat was massive intervention by the Soviet Union and the arrival of thousands of Cuban troops. An intermittent civil war continued for the next twenty-seven years.

  The collapse of Portugal’s African empire presented new dangers for the white rulers of Rhodesia. Small bands of nationalist guerrillas had been infiltrating across the northern border from bases in Zambia and Mozambique’s Tete province since 1972, but the government’s counter-insurgency measures had been largely successful in containing them. To help shore up Rhodesia’s defences, South Africa had dispatched large numbers of combat police to the area, regarding the Zambezi River rather than the Limpopo as its own front line. But the end of Portuguese rule meant that Rhodesia’s entire eastern border, some 760 miles long, was now vulnerable to infiltration by guerrilla groups operating freely from bases in Mozambique.

  From 1976, guerrilla warfare steadily spread like a plague across rural areas. Thousands of Zanu guerrillas crossed from Mozambique, attacking white homesteads, robbing stores, planting landmines and subverting the local population. Zapu guerrillas opened a new front in western Rhodesia, along the borders with Zambia and Botswana. Main roads and railways came under attack. White farmers bore the brunt, living daily with the risk of ambush, barricaded at night in fortified homes. A growing number of whites emigrated, rather than face military service.

  Rhodesia’s war forced South Africa to alter its own strategy. Hitherto, the South African government had regarded Rhodesia, along with Portuguese Angola and Mozambique, as an essential part of the buffer zone separating South Africa from black Africa. But the withdrawal of the Portuguese meant that Rhodesia was no longer considered so important as a front-line defence, for the winds of change had reached South Africa’s own frontier. The South Africans calculated that white rule in Rhodesia, without an open-ended military and financial commitment on their part, was ultimately doomed and that their interests would be better served by having a stable black government there, heavily dependent on South African goodwill, rather than an unstable white one under siege.

  In blunt talks in Pretoria in 1976, Rhodesia’s recalcitrant leader, Ian Smith, was given no option but to accept the idea of black majority rule. Making clear his disdain for the whole process, Smith entered into protracted negotiations with a moderate nationalist faction led by Bishop Abel Muzorewa aiming to reach an ‘internal’ settlement which would leave the whites largely in control. Although Muzorewa won elections in 1979, the guerrilla war spread ever further. When Smith finally left the stage as prime minister on the last day of white rule on 31 May 1979, fourteen years after proclaiming Rhodesia’s unilateral declaration of independence, his legacy was a state unrecognised by the international community, subjected to trade boycotts, ravaged by civil war and facing a perilous future.

  As the war intensified, Britain set up a conference in London hoping that negotiations between the main protagonists – Joshua Nkomo’s Zapu, Robert Mugabe’s Zanu and Muzorewa’s government – might find a way through the impasse. Nkomo and Muzorewa were ready to accept a deal paving the way for another round of elections, but Mugabe held out to the last. Alone among the nationalist leaders, Mugabe wanted a military victory and was planning a new phase of urban warfare. Only an ultimatum from Mozambique’s Samora Machel forced him to sign.

  The London agreement, reached in December 1979, involved Britain sending out to Rhodesia a small team of officials to hold the ring between an assortment of armies in the hope that a ceasefire would last long enough for elections to be held. With the return from exile of Nkomo and Mugabe, the election campaign was fought with ferocious intent. All sides were judged guilty of using intimidation and violence but Mugabe’s Zanu-PF was singled out as the main culprit. ‘The word intimidation is mild,’ roared Nkomo. ‘People are being terrorised. It is terror. There is fear in people’s eyes.’ The election results in March 1980, however, gave Mugabe such an overwhelming victory that arguments over the effect of violence became largely irrelevant.

  Much to the surprise of the white community, Mugabe used his election victory as an occasion to pledge his support for reconciliation. ‘If yesterday I fought you as an enemy, today you have become a friend and ally with the same national interest, loyalty, rights and duties as myself,’ he said. ‘It could never be a correct justification that because the whites oppressed us yesterday when they had the power, the blacks must oppress them today because they have power. An evil remains an evil whether practised by white against black or black against white.’ He called for a new vision and a new spirit.

  Zimbabwe, it seemed, was on the threshold of an era of great promise, born out of civil war, but bursting with new ambition. Mugabe’s fine words, however, did not apply to his Zapu rivals. From the outset, Mugabe’s ambition was to establish a one-party state, using whatever means were necessary. Within weeks of independence in April 1980, his ministers began to talk openly about the need to ‘crush’ Zapu. In October, he signed an agreement with North Korea, a brutal communist dictatorship, for assistance in training a new army brigade – 5 Brigade – with the specific remit to deal with internal dissidents. Mugabe’s drive for a one-party state culminated in a campaign of terror and murder unleashed by 5 Brigade against the civilian population in Zapu strongholds in Matabeleland. Villagers were executed en masse; blockades were enforced to ensure mass starvation; thousands of men, women and children were taken to interrogation centres notorious as places of brutality and torture. The death toll reached as many as 20,000 people. After five years of persecution, Nkomo capitulated, signing a ‘unity accord’.

  In South Africa, after a decade of silence, a new generation of black activists took up the cause of anti-apartheid resistance. They came from the ranks of the student population, finding inspiration not from the concept of multiracial struggle that the African National Congress had championed but from a sense of the need for black assertiveness more in line with the Africanist tradition of black politics. Black consciousness groups in South Africa gained a dramatic boost in confidence when Portuguese rule in Angola and Mozambique collapsed in 1974, paving the way for black liberation movements to take control. Student activists t
ook the lead, focusing their protests on the government’s system of ‘Bantu’ education which had produced a legacy of inferior schooling, poorly trained teachers, overcrowded classrooms and inadequate equipment. New government regulations requiring instruction in Afrikaans ignited further protests. In June 1976, student demonstrators marching through Soweto, a black suburb on the outskirts of Johannesburg, were met by armed police who opened fire, killing a thirteen-year-old schoolboy and provoking a student uprising that lasted for six months.

  Although government repression succeeded in keeping the lid on anti-apartheid protest at home, South Africa’s white rulers faced new external dangers. Since the departure of the Portuguese, Mozambique and Angola had been ruled by Marxist governments friendly to the Soviet Union and willing to provide sanctuaries and training facilities to the exiled African National Congress. One consequence of the Soweto revolt was that it led to an exodus of some 14,000 black youths, providing the ANC with an army of eager recruits. From 1977, ANC guerrillas infiltrated across South Africa’s borders, beginning a low-level sabotage campaign. The advent of black nationalist rule in Zimbabwe in 1980 completed South Africa’s encirclement to the north by hostile governments.

  A hardline prime minister, P.W. Botha, elected to lead the National Party in 1978, set out to confront both external and internal threats by constructing a massive security apparatus, licensing security officials to take whatever action they deemed necessary at home and abroad. Secret units were soon involved in bombing, arson, kidnapping and assassination. From bases in the Transvaal, South African military intelligence trained, armed and directed a Mozambique rebel group, Renamo, sending it across the border to destroy bridges, railways, agricultural projects and schools.

  Simultaneously, Botha sought to modernise apartheid, to rid it of its more impractical encumbrances, to make it function more effectively. He encouraged moves to scrap petty-apartheid rules used to enforce segregation in public places such as post offices and park benches. He suggested that laws banning interracial marriage and sex should no longer be regarded as ‘holy cows’. African workers were permitted to join registered trade unions. Most job reservation regulations were scrapped. In piecemeal fashion, Botha also endorsed plans to improve conditions in black urban areas. After thirty years of harsh legislation designed to drive out the black population from ‘white’ areas, the government finally recognised their right to live there permanently, according them property rights. But while allowing reforms to the fringes of apartheid, Botha remained as determined as ever to enforce white domination, its central purpose.